Zvika, The default behavior for servlets is to have a *single* servlet instance serve all incoming requests for that servlet, simultaneously. In other words, it's not that each incoming request instantiates your servlet; on the contrary, the servlet only gets instantiated once in the lifetime of your webserver (well, more or less).
That's why it's a bad idea to declare member data fields for servlets; you may as well be declaring static fields, because that's effectively what you're doing. Same thing with declaring variables in <%! %> blocks in JSP. The exception is if you implement SingleThreadModel, which guarantees that a single instance of a servlet will not be serving two requests simultaneously; the spec doesn't make it clear whether that happens via synchronization, or whether multiple instance get created. http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/servlets/client-interaction/threads. html Hope that helps clear it up a little. -jmc =========================================================================== To unsubscribe: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "signoff JSP-INTEREST". For digest: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "set JSP-INTEREST DIGEST". Some relevant FAQs on JSP/Servlets can be found at: http://archives.java.sun.com/jsp-interest.html http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/faq.html http://www.esperanto.org.nz/jsp/jspfaq.jsp http://www.jguru.com/faq/index.jsp http://www.jspinsider.com
